


Novel Recognition

by FadedSepia



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Shifting Internal Perspective, Soulmates, Winterhawk Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:39:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24877828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FadedSepia/pseuds/FadedSepia
Summary: Bucky tries to ignore the sudden change, the words that push to the surface of his skin some time between getting off work and getting Steve’s rail-thin ass up the stairs without falling or bruising any more of his best friend’s ribs, but…Why the fuck would it show up now?Bucky Barnes finally has a soulmate; someone he knows, but has yet to meet.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton
Comments: 44
Kudos: 192
Collections: Winterhawk Remix 2020





	Novel Recognition

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lissadiane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lissadiane/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Blame It On Bad Luck](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20100319) by [Lissadiane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lissadiane/pseuds/Lissadiane). 



> Winterhawk Remix 2020 for Lissadiane: An inspiration, as a writer and a person.
> 
> Big thanks to ElloPoppet and WeepingNaiad for their support and beta reading!

_**yeah  
you know me** _

Bucky tries to ignore the sudden change, the words that push to the surface of his skin some time between getting off work and getting Steve’s rail-thin ass up the stairs without falling or bruising any more of his best friend’s ribs, but…

Why the fuck would it show up _now?_

The question is rhetorical, the answer metaphysical, and both – in Bucky’s opinion – are bullshit. Nobody’s sure _why_ they appear when they do; all he’s ever heard is that soul marks only come up with the right combination of stress and fate and time. All Bucky knows is that Stevie Rogers is the primary _stressor_ in his life, that his only _fate_ is to be stuck finishing the fights other people start, and that twenty-one is a stupid _time_ to finally be getting one of these damn inky marks. Bucky grumbles to himself – nobody ever told him the fucking things itched like raw wool on sunburn when they came in – and slaps his right hand against the scribble of words smattered in two lines across his left wrist, if only to keep from scratching at it. He has more important things to attend to; Stevie’s ribs aren’t going to wrap themselves.

Speaking of, his best friend is grinning like the god-damned shit he is, wincing as he pokes Bucky in the shoulder. “See, Buck; told you it’d happen.”

“I’ll call the papers. Front page, above the fold. ‘ _Brooklyn Queer Gets Soul Mark; Mother Rolls in Grave.’”_

“You’ve got nothin’ to be scared over; whoever it is is gonna already know. Nobody to judge, yeah?” Steve lifts his arm with a hiss. “Besides, it’s not like mine’s all that much better. At least yours sounds friendly.”

Bucky nods, eyeing the half-cursive along Steve’s ribs with a resigned sigh, careful not to trace the darkly limned words – _Oh, yeah, hi. They told me you’d be coming._ – as he wraps the linen strips. “Yeah, but, maybe it’s when you’re doing the milk deliveries again?”

“Who tells someone about the milkman comin?’”

“Who tells you you already know ’em?”

_**yeah  
you know me** _

Stress and fate and bad fucking luck; that’s what it is, what Bucky will blame it on. It doesn’t matter where he is or what he’s doing, it’s always the worst possible moment that the scribbles along his wrist itch, drawing attention to the nonsense note beneath his uniform sleeve just as he manages to find cover from the current barrage. It should be comforting – “Maybe it means they’re thinking of you, Buck.” – and it sounds conversational – it’s clearly familiar – but the words scrawled on the inside of Bucky’s left arm have never made him feel _comforted,_ not the way other people have described it. The letters have always seemed a little off-putting, probably because they’re written in some of the worst penmanship Bucky’s ever seen; possibly because only the first bit is an actual word, as opposed to a jumble of broken letters that Bucky has to squint into cohesion.

The mark starts off decently enough with _yeah_ on the first line. The second, though, slips down his arm, more blobs of letters than words, like a note written in the dark. Luckily, the clusters have always – to Bucky, anyway – been three words, and those words really only string together in one order; ‘ _me know you’_ and ‘ _know you me’_ and ‘ _me you know’_ are understandable, but wrong, and the _yeah_ undoubtedly comes first. Unless his soulmate doesn’t speak English, which – now that he’s thought of it – isn’t a possibility he’d considered before. Who’d plan to meet their soulmate at the front?

Maybe Bucky’s is out _there,_ somewhere beyond the barbed wire and bombed-out buildings. That’d be something. Wouldn’t Stevie be surprised if he came back with a handsome Frenchman on his arm? Provided, of course, that he lives to see the other side of this volley. He tugs the edge of his sleeve, then settles back in with his rifle. Time for that later, yeah?

_**you know me** _

Nobody’s ever said those words to Bucky, in proper order or otherwise. Nobody ever will, not now. Not in this frigid mountain hell, no matter how much his damn arm itches, or how much Bucky’s back hurts – how much Bucky’s _everything_ hurts. He’s going to die down here, and not even get to learn who it is; who he _knows._

The only part of Bucky that doesn’t hurt is his arm, but his wrist itches some kind of fiercely, and… Oh. It’s shattered, so can it really be that? Can it really be the mark with his arm mangled so far beyond recognition? With his coat torn, his skin shredded through to bone? Bucky wonders if losing the mark means losing the person it’s supposed to connect him to. If that’s the case, then it’s a shame; no handsome Frenchman for him. It’s not funny – at best perhaps only mildly tragic – but Bucky chuckles besides. It itches. Half his goddamn arm isn’t even fucking there, but still. It _itches._

Bucky lies there, tripping over his own thoughts as the snow falls around him. He should roll over – the snowflakes sting his eyes as they drift down – but he’s tired and sore, and still not sure how he managed to drag himself out of the water in the first place. He’s finally gotten a grip in the snow with his right hand, his _only working hand,_ and that’s not doing much, but he thinks he can hear something. There’s a rhythmic shushing; the steady tread of feet in the snow. Bucky might be imagining them approaching, but then he sees them, two figures coalescing as they emerge from the fluttering white, goggled faces unrecognizable as they bend close before he feels arms beneath him.

_**you know** _

“You know you’re not getting out of this place, Sergeant.” There’s a rough hand gripping his jaw, a cloth swiping quickly across his face, scrubbing the blood dried at the edge of his mouth from the last _session._ “The least you could do is make it easy; for us, if not for yourself. We _could_ have left you on the mountain, but you were too valuable to the cause.”

They expect him to be grateful, it seems.

Bucky doesn’t want to be grateful, doesn’t want to make things _easier_ for himself. If he had his druthers, he’d’ve bitten through that cloth, right into this fucker’s hand, but – damnit – he’s too tired. He can only chuckle brokenly, screamed-out voice grating, even to his own ears, “Do I know you, asshole?”

It’s not until after the words have left his mouth that Bucky realizes; he might have set one of these bastards up to answer him, to say the words he has to believe would still be there, if only Bucky could see them.

“Yes – dear boy – I’m quite sure you do; though, I believe I know you better than you know yourself.”

It starts off disgustingly close, but Bucky can still square his shoulders and push that particular terror away; Zola had hands on him long before he ever got here, and Bucky never felt anything beyond a churning nausea over the whole ordeal.

“You don’t know shit.”

_**you… know?** _

Prisoner – _Bucky, right? I’m_ – Five-six-eight-nine-eight remembers the first time someone came for him. The table, the torture, the people, they’re all the same. The rescue will be, too, he thinks. Maybe not – _Who was it? Was it –_ Stevie this time. A different person, one he knows and hasn’t met. Doesn’t make sense, but so little does anymore.

He can’t see his arm – they’ve draped it with a curtain, and they’re working behind it – but he can feel it; honestly _feel_ it, fingers and thumb like they were. _Almost._

“Make a fist.”

 _How?_ They’re telling him – _ordering him_ – to use a hand that shouldn’t be there. He can’t make sense of it, hasn’t used that hand in – _Weeks? Months, maybe; days at least, but still a –_ long while, and he shouldn’t. The fingers are gone; the wrist and elbow and- There was something else, something important and – _you know_ – he should remember, but he can’t, so he tries to follow the orders. It hurts always, but _less_ if he does as he’s told. When he tries, he sees the men offer each other congratulatory nods above the curtain; hears a clacking like typewriter keys.

“Now unclench your hand, Five-six-eight.”

He releases his hold. He remembers that feeling, and the proper grip on a stock, and something, maybe on his arm or maybe inside, a… tingle? No – _you know_ – that’s not what it was it was an-

“Excellent work.” A goggled face rises over the curtain, tipping toward him. “Successful this time.”

“Finally.”

He’s a success, whatever that means; maybe that they’ll come sooner, his whomever-they-are; then he’ll say it, ’ _I know you,’_ and they’ll say… _Something?_

Yeah, he knows; he doesn’t remember, but he knows. In the time between cold and waking, he remembers, and he _knows._

_**you… no…** _

There was something before this. The Asset doesn’t recall much of the time between and before his objectives, but _someone_ remembers. The Asset never knows if it’s _apart from_ him or _a part of_ him, but he hears it, in the long spaces between waking, soft and muffled; woolen, irritating inside his brain and down along his arm. It’s frightened, stammering like the targets that try to persuade him, babbling nonsense through the Asset’s otherwise placid dreams, huddled and lonely and cold; a leftover dreg that was never properly scrubbed out, whimpering out things he can plainly hear, but still doesn’t understand.

The Asset can’t help but notice it, even if he’s only half listening to the tentative phrase on loop – _“I know you.“_ – even if he can’t discern who _I_ and _you_ are. Sometimes – when the objectives are completed, when his maintenance is finished and the moment comes to be put away, when the irritating rub flares above his silver hand – he tries to follow that echo to its source; the Asset traces the string of words back, finds the tiny hollow place inside and wonders why it’s warm.

“ _I know you.”_

The voice is familiar, old; from the sometime before this. His handlers didn’t put it there, haven’t ever tried to take it away, never even ask about it. It is… _his?_ It is his, so the Asset says nothing, only listens and waits for something like an answer.

It is not a short wait, but waiting is what he does.

The air is warm outside, humid – _Summer_ – when he returns for debrief storage. The voice is always louder in storage, but the Asset doesn’t attend to the meaningless words circling his head – “ _I know you.”_ – not until the day he hears words and realizes they aren’t _his._

“ _Yeah. You know me.”_

The Asset wakes in his container, hand breaching the door, staring at wide eyes through the viewing pane. Someone is in here with him; he can hear them screaming.

**… _no…_**

The Asset has seen inside his arm countless times, has watched the glinting plates retract and hinge during maintenance, knows the arm feels nothing, _is nothing_ but metal plates and hydraulics; servos and circuits and endless runs of wire, completely inert. He knows, he has been told, and yet, the Asset still _feels something._ He slaps his palm over the joint of his wrist, flesh hitting the thin strip of metal bared between the edge of his jacket and the glove on his hand. It doesn’t help. The Asset still feels what is almost a pain, but not quite; a nearly tingling thrum inside the arm, under the plating where he cannot reach. A malfunction, perhaps?

 _No._ Not that; it isn’t _pain,_ but it is just as familiar because it… It’s happened before, hasn’t it? An almost burning jitter… an _itch._ That’s what this is.

His arm _itches_ , as does his face, bared now without the muzzle and guard.They took it off before he went into storage. It is unnecessary for this mission, and useless for the periods between; it stops the voice outside, but never the one _inside._

The Asset shifts as the crowd flows by.

There are eyes on him, neither those of his handler nor of their sniper. Heat flares in the back corner of his mind – searing and sudden – and the Asset feels his gaze drawn across the plaza, over milling bodies, scanning faces, searching; until he freezes, familiarity spilling from that muffled, woolen, buried place as the Asset catches sight of a man he’s never seen.

The stranger’s eyes widen, and he pivots; does he also recognize the Asset?

_**yeah** _

There’s a shushing in his brain, not from the rush of water in the fountain beside him, but from the well worn words swirling warmly behind his eyes.

The man steps closer.

The Asset stays where he is, drinking in the familiar novelty of the other man, even as he struggles to make sense of it, to ignore the itching of his mechanized limb.

The stranger isn’t one of theirs. The insignia is SHIELD, but he’s never been a target. The Asset _remembers_ his targets; he’s never seen the man in the vest, never focused a scope on his quiver, on mussed blond hair and calloused hands. Still, the Asset is… _considering?_ – yes – considering whether he -

_**you** _

\- ought to say something. To acknowledge the man who is still advancing, now so near to him, blue eyes drawing up unfamiliar sensations that the Asset is certain he’s felt before because he’s just as certain he has talked to this man before. Never seen him, never met him, but they’ve spoken. The man in front of him isn’t a stranger, but he isn’t sure how that can be possible. He doesn’t-

_**know** _

He is -

_**me** _

He fumbles internally. The voice between his ears is screaming; his mouth is closed. He can’t think, can’t focus, the words forcing out from that tiny corner to flood his brain. _I… no…_ – No! – _I know…_

The stranger stops, close enough that he could touch the man if he wanted to.

The Asset draws a breath.

Five-six-eight-nine-eight swallows down his apprehension.

B-

Bucky opens his mouth, the words tripping past his lips without his permission. “I know you.”

Eyes like ice over ocean water crinkle at the edges, but they leave him feeling _whole,_ and he isn’t sure why until the his soulmate answers. “Yeah. You know me.”


End file.
